Games you found unbearably long

[Akihiko]

First one that came to mind was Grand Theft Auto 4. Own 2 copies of it, and have had it for years and I'm still no where near completing it. My main problem is there's so many boring missions for boring characters, and you HAVE to do them. I find it retarded that it implies that you have choice over whether you do these missions. You don't, you have to do them you're only choice is what order, and I hardly call that choice.

I'd argue Red Dead Redemption had the same problem too, there was still an insane amount of 'filler' missions that didn't add much to the story. On the other hand I did find the mission givers in RDR to be more interesting than the generic gangster and druggy types we've seen in every GTA to date.

 

[icame]

Kingdom Hearts. All of them are TOO. DAMN. LONG.

D-don't diss my favourite game ever. I get sad. =(
Kingdom Hearts was awesome! And it wasn't that long, although it did have a lot of cutscenes. xD

Some people can get annoyed when their games stop being games for more then 5 minutes I suppose. Despite loving the MGS games I wanted to throw my controller sometimes with how many cutscenes there were.

 

[Swifteye]

Final fantasy 7 just doesn't hold my interest to trudge through it and phantom brave requires so much grinding for so little a story worth listening too.

 

[Austin Howe]

Final Fantasy XII

 

[Protocol95]

I personally found Half-Life 2 to drag on too much and have many needless bumps in the road.

 

[The Human Torch]

Darksiders, the Black Throne level.
Six hours of doing nothing but solve puzzles by using portals, mirrors, boomerangs, grappling hooks, bombs and moving walls/ceilings up and down. It's long, it's tedious, it's frustrating and it's really, really fucking boring!
There is barely any combat to break up the puzzle-marathon. I actually stopped playing there, fuck you, puzzle-designers.

 

[GrimSheeper]

CoD in general/GTA IV...

I really want to hear how Call of Duty, a game that is so short and compact you can play through the game three times per day is unbearably long to you. GTA IV I have to agree on, never finished it because I was absolutely not going to bear another phone call that would needlessly distract me from actually playing the game.

 

[LordGarbageMan]

Completely disagree with people who say GTA4. It's an epic, but it's so fucking good, I thought the characters were well written and well acted. As for too long, definitely FarCry2; I loved the world they made, and the Jackal was an interesting character, with them going for the whole Heart of Darkness deal, but they had the story points wayyy to far and in between for me to keep going.

 

[DethKid]

just cause 2...

too much mindless stuff getting in the way of the story...which was pretty poor anyway...it was fu nto muck around in...but i just felt it drgged everything out because the island was too big and transport was too thinly distributed...

 

[Kyoufuu]

Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

In-game time might not actually be that long, but when you can only play for 15 minutes at a time before being too spooked to continue, it's gonna take a while to beat.

 

[Subwayeatn]

Final Fantasy Tactics. It was just so booring even after the first 20 hours or so.

 

[PekoponTAS]

There aren't really any games I LIKE that I feel are stretched out too long, but two games I wasn't a fan of that I did actually complete that were WAY too long were Elebits for the Wii, and Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia for the DS. I love the original Pokemon Ranger, and a big thing that's nice about it is that if you're good, you can beat it in about 8 hours. Pokemon Ranger Shadows of Almia on the other hand was stretched out to a horrendously long play time of 25 and a half hours, and so much of that time was faffing about in endless painful dialogue that made me want to hang myself every time I heard the word "friend" or "dreams". Not to mention the game's difficulty was dumbed down after people complained the first one was too hard, and thus it made it an INCREDIBLY easy, and also boring game. Hell, Elebits was a pretty lousy game that went on too long, but I hold a special place in my heart for it because of its incredible ending. Shadows of Almia doesn't even have that much going for it, and was probably the most tedious and padded out game I've ever played.

 

[aquailiz]

Final Fantasy 13

The fact that it was long isn't a bad thing on it's own.

FF13 is just a terribly boring experience, with horribly contrived character development, uninvolving combat, linear gameplay (even for a JRPG) and a story that only makes sense if you read the codex entries.

I stopped playing it about 30 hours in, because absolutely fuck all interesting happens.

Pretty much this. It's plot was infinitesimally small compared to any other Final Fantasy game since so much less happens, and it would have been so much easier to condense, but it was like the game designers felt, "Oh, shit, well, this is a Final Fantasy game so it has to be 100 hours long, so let's drag everything out and repeat everything a million times and make sure we take five hours worth of scattered, disconnected cutscenes to establish something about the past that a competent writer could conveyed in about five minutes."

Like, seriously, it takes twenty to thirty hours for the game to actually get some coherent semblance of a plot together. By that point in Final Fantasy IX, I was on DISC THREE; major cities had been blown up; characters had grown and changed by the events; the plot had constantly moved forward; romantic tension had been developed; new characters with new motivations had been introduced; the major villain had been established as a threat; the earlier villains had already been defeated/killed/converted to good. In plain, lots had happened.

On hindsight, it's true, in the earlier FFs places actually got destroyed! unable-to-go-back destroyed. That takes a lot of balls storywise, considering not many modern rpgs do it a lot.

 

[Scabadus]

It's been said, but Far Cry 2. Which is a shame, because there was a fantastic game in there somewhere and when it managed to escape from the dirty fingers of the Devs for a few seconds it shone spectacularly. Then an enemy would respawn because you took half a second too long blinking, or an SUV would try to ram your enoumours military truck (with a grenade launcher bolted to the roof) off the road, or everyone would try to kill you for no reason, or an invisible wall would spring up on the fucking open-world sandbox and stop you from reaching the perfect sniper spot you could see....

Or you'd run into the lack of a 'climb' button, or your car would get destroyed leaving you to hike hours to the objective, or every enemy ever would hear your silenced weapon through the jeep driving by, or you could select the huge M249 machine gun as a fourth weapon but not a little MP5, or you couldn't just pull out a gun and shoot the guy you're meant to assassinate because he's importent, or you couldn't look and see how many maleria pills you had left, or you couldn't cure your maleria, or you actually GET maleria (seriously, who gives the protagonist maleria?) or you get kicked in the nuts once more by the devs not releasing the damn SDK so that people could mod the game.

Shockingly, I could actually go on. But I won't.

41 Damn hours I put into that game, because I refused to let it beat me. And all I got for it was

Spoiler: Ending Spoiler

the choice to blow myself up or shoot myself. What. The. Fuck?!?! Where's the third option where I say FUCK THESE PEOPLE, empty half a clip of 12 guage rounds into the fucking Jackal, and get out of that shit hole as fast as I can run?

So yeah. There's my rant.

 

[MoNKeyYy]

Lost Oddyssey. Remains to date as one of the only games I've never finished because it went nowhere. Also Tales of Symphonia. Although this might not be a case of "Game drags on too long" so much as it's a case of "I don't like JRPGs". Although in fairness I always start out liking them then find that they get boring and drag on...

 

[varulfic]

The first Red Faction dragged along. It's length was especially grating since 90% of the game (no exaggeration) is spent running through the same red caves.

 

[ClockworkAngel]

Persona 3. As much as I loved that game, it had insane amounts of filler.

This example isn't mine, it happened to a friend:

He was close to what seemed like the end, at 80 hours. He wanted to finish Persona 3 because another game he really wanted to play was coming out soon. Turns out, his total play-time would come to be about 200 hours, and neither of us are the type of gamer who would ever 100% a game like Persona 3.

 

[MAUSZX]

Red Dead Redemption spent far too much time in Mexico.

Who wants to be in Mexico in the first place?!

Look I'm a Mexican and I live in Mexico and let me tell you something... YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY right.... shame, but anyway yeah right now it kinda suck, u go out to the street and you don't know who´s worse, drug dealers or cops, but anyway there is no perfect country.

I didn't like RDR that much, I mean I spend hours doing random stuff and then I enter to Mexico and BLING FIRST TROPHIE??? WHAT?? does this means I just start this game?? and the answer is yes, so i said.... hell i live in Mexico why would I like to be there in a videogame.

 

[KafkaOffTheBeach]

I'm gonna go all out and say Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Valkyria Chronicles.
I love them to death, but both of them should have known when to just shut the fuck up. Valkyria in particular.
I mean - I can deal with loading times and overly long cutscenes fine, but when the important points are padded to fucking oblivion it becomes a bit too much. I loved the side things in Valkyria, like the interviews with Rosie and Largo, the Newspaper Reports, the character bios etc. but the fact that I had to slog through so much pointless verbosity and exposition to get to one important moment, be it a battle or a revelation or a touching encounter with a soldier in the woods, it just annoyed me. It's not even the expositional nature of the cutscenes that made me think it was too long actually - it was the way the whole thing was presented between cutscenes and between battles. Returning to the book made me feel like I should have accomplished something, but because I had to go back so many times it felt like some sort of bus-stop in purgatory, taking me round and round, showing me things, albeit briefly, letting me take the wheel for a wee while, but taking me back to the same place with alarming speed and efficiency.
Castlevania just decided to fuck pacing in the ass sporadically - leaving me pretty much emotionally drained by half-way, wishing it would just get a fucking move on. Like making the first couple of sections/acts/waypoints/whatever really long and boring before, suddenly, ICE GIANTS, FUCKING....DEATH THINGS, KILLING HOLY KNIGHTS, OH MY GOOOOOOOOD! Nah, we were fucking with you. Back to some overly long, arbitrarily challenging levels. OH SHIT LITTLE ******, WE SHRUNK THE FUCK OUT OF YOU!
What a strange paragraph.

Also, special mention should go to Darksiders for having the only level in the history of levels that made me put down my controller in disgust. That shit basically doubled my total play time.

 

[Killclaw Kilrathi]

The main campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2. Maybe a weird choice but it seriously started wearing out its welcome by the third "chapter". By the time I put the sword back together I just didn't care anymore.